Abstract

A growing body of research about personal epistemological beliefs has provided tertiary educators with evidence to inform strategies in promoting effective teaching and learning. Personal epistemological beliefs refer to an individual’s beliefs about the nature of knowing and knowledge and are considered to influence how one engages in teaching and learning experiences. There has been very little research, to date, that has explored how pre-service teacher education students’ beliefs change over time and identified factors associated with such changes. No research exists in the area of early childhood teacher education. This paper uses current literature on the development of epistemological beliefs to provide a conceptual framework on which to base intervention for early childhood pre-service teacher education students. It is focused on providing a constructivist approach to knowledge through personal engagement and authentic experiences.

These databases contain citations from different subsets of available publications and different time periods and thus the citation count from each is usually different. Some works are not in either database and no count is displayed. Scopus includes citations from articles published in 1996 onwards, and Web of Science® generally from 1980 onwards.

Citations counts from the Google Scholar™ indexing service can be viewed at the linked Google Scholar™ search.

Full-text downloads displays the total number of times this work’s files (e.g., a PDF) have been downloaded from QUT ePrints as well as the number of downloads in the previous 365 days. The count includes downloads for all files if a work has more than one.